Wednesday, February 08, 2006

When the US didn’t capture Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, it wasn’t by mistake, Congressman Maurice Hinchey of Hurley theorized.

Instead, Hinchey said the Administration had a motive for not capturing him. “Why did we do that? The only logical answer that comes to mind is they didn’t want to capture Bin Laden because if they captured Bin Laden and wiped out the Taliban, which they could have done at that moment, there would have been no justification for going to war in Iraq, and they wanted to use that as a justification for attacking Iraq,” he said.

Hinchey is a critic of the war in Iraq and the Bush administration, who he says lied about the reasons for going into Iraq.

Bush went after Saddam not out of confusion or error, but because he knew Osama, though useful, was too short a tail to fully wag the dog....Remember that after George H.W. Bush defeated Iraq in 1991, he looked invincible at home - until the image of the conquering hero faded a year later, and he lost to Bill Clinton. The lesson George W. Bush learned from his father's experience is now obvious: the mistake was not in ending Operation Desert Storm too soon: it was in letting the war end at all....From Bush's perspective, Iraq has been a total success, as has the cat and mouse with Osama. He had no plan to "win the peace" because he has no intention of winning it - winning implies that the war is over, and peace is the one unacceptable outcome.

I won't take credit for direct cause and effect here. But if you google Bush and "endless war" it is the fourth result listed (out of more than 200,000), so somebody must be noticing.